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  Halfway up the mountain, most of Idina’s new farm was sloping but, just beyond and below Chops’ house, she found a spot for a home. This consisted of a few acres that had plateaued out and clung precariously to the side of the mountain above a steep drop towards the distant, dry, yellow Rift Valley below. She decided to position the house at the back of this area, so that it could take shelter from the mountain slope behind and leave room for a sprawling expanse of lawn and garden leading to the cliff edge. This she left fringed with eucalyptus, thronging with the company of large, beautiful, humanoid colobus monkeys. Between the trunks it was possible to glimpse a kaleidoscope of green foothill and amber valley floor but little prepared a visitor for the shock of walking through the trees to suddenly stand on the edge of a mountain-forest world and look beyond to a grassland world stretching almost as far as the eye could see.

  Up in the hills, most of the settler farmers, even Alice and the Happy Valley set, lived in corrugated-iron-roofed cottages. The few grand houses in Kenya, like Oserian or Kiki Preston’s Mundui, were confined to the shores of Lake Naivasha or the outskirts of Nairobi. Idina, however, had no intention of seeing her new husband leave her for a grander house.

  Clouds was a mountain house, an African house, its single storey dwarfed by its high-vaulted roof but this roof was not, like Slains, made of the standard corrugated iron but thousands of handsome dark-cedar shingles. The house itself was square and entered from the back, the mountain side. Here Idina spread a large gravel drive and surrounded it with beds of hibiscus, rose and bougainvillea bursting with red and orange, purple and white – which distracted from the sprawl of stables and dairies to the side. And sprawl it was as, for all its traits of pleasure palace, Clouds was a working dairy farm. As Europe and the United States spiralled into the mass unemployment and bankruptcy of the Great Depression, Idina, perched on a mountain ledge thousands of feet up under the Equator, was slowly building, this time, a Guernsey herd.

  The entrance to the house was through an archway leading to a central courtyard garden divided into four equal corners of lawn, two straight paths crossing in the centre point, where a sundial stood framed by four circular urns overflowing with greenery. Around the edge of this ran an open cloister of a passageway linking a series of doors.

  Clouds, wrote Rosita Forbes, who stayed with Idina there, and copied some of the design for her own, Bahamian retreat, was an ‘entrancing’ house. ‘It was the last word in comfort, and it was clever too – in the way that the rooms fitted . . . A house should be planned like a coat and skirt . . . It should fit and suit the people who are going to live in it. Dina’s low grey house on rising ground about the tawny plain fulfilled these conditions. It was welcoming and at the same time, mysterious.’3

  On either side of the courtyard ran two long bedroom wings, like the rest of the house a single room deep, and in all containing six guest bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and hot water tank heated by a bonfire outside. Inside each there was a fireplace, too; a deep, wide fireplace that shared a chimney with the adjoining room and through which – if a fire was not lit – a guest could crawl to his neighbour. The bedrooms, indeed the entire house, were panelled to give the same matt, dark effect that Idina had planned for Kildonan fifteen years earlier. She furnished them with four-poster beds and tapestries, each with furniture of a different period and style. At one end of these rooms were two others – a nursery for Dinan and an adjoining room for her governess, a lady called Joan Trent who had come with them from England.

  The main rooms spread across the front of the house. On the far right a dining room looked out from the corner of the house. This led into a drawing room panelled not only on the walls but on the ceiling too, giving it the air of a sixteenth-century farmhouse in some English rural retreat. Inside, Idina had scattered Knole sofas around the wide fireplace and cushions over the deep window seats looking out over the lawn and Rift Valley beyond. On one side French doors led out on to a terrace scattered with chairs and tables and surrounded by both Idina’s plants and flowers and a great panorama of African scents and sounds. Back inside, a thick velvet curtain hung across the archway into the library, the walls again laddered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a deep white sofa piled high with cushions facing also out to the lawn.

  Beyond this, in the far wall, was a door to Idina’s bedroom. It was a large room, almost the size of the drawing room, but, sited on the corner of the house, it again had windows on two sides. Beyond its sleeping area was another ‘room’, space for a writing desk and chair, another sofa even, all looking out to the view beyond. Towards the rear of the house was another door from Idina’s bedroom that led into a vast bathroom. Along one wall stretched a bath, a shining lion’s head tap above it. Opposite ran twenty feet of walk-in cupboards, rails above and, below, a staircase of shoe racks containing Idina’s dozens and dozens of barely worn shoes. In the far corner of this room there was another door. Almost invisible in the wall next to the bath, it led into the neighbouring bedroom.

  Clouds was, for a mountain lodge, palatial. It could take a dozen guests overnight and, remoter than Slains, it needed to; once a guest had arrived they had to stay. In the rainy season, when the roads were impassable, its only access was by aeroplanes landing on the wide, open lawn. Idina made it worth the journey. The French Marie had come back to Kenya with Idina and again they trained up a cook and kitchen boys to produce soufflés. The familiar silk pyjamas and whisky bottles lay on the pillow, fires raged in the fireplaces, hot water bucketed out of the taps and champagne brimmed from glasses. In the evening Idina appeared in a dark-blue velvet kaftan to keep out the night cold: it was colder and higher than Slains up here. By day she wore corduroys, an open-necked white shirt and, as ever, bare feet.

  Idina and Donald entertained from the start. Familiar faces from the twenties, and a few new ones, turned up by car, by plane, on horseback, some even on foot at the end of a planned safari to the house. The tables and sofas filled. Alice, who had eventually married Raymond and then, three tempestuous months later, separated from him, had returned to Kenya from a Europe plunged into Depression. Even her and Idina’s favourite clothes designers were suffering. From their hill farms the two women were now sending regular financial aid to Paris. In return they received pieces from the latest collections in which they continued to dress exquisitely, even for picnics down on the floor of the Rift Valley.

  Up at Clouds the lights were kept on well past the usual ten-thirty generator shutdown. At first, even these late evenings were proper enough to invite Dinan’s governess to. (One, Joan Trent, thus met and married Boy Long’s brother Dan.) But, as it became clear, Idina, whisky flowing through her veins, soon felt the old ‘beasts’ return. Donald was tall, classically handsome, if with a hairline that receded a little far for his thirty-odd years. But Donald was not enough.

  One evening Chops Ramsden went to gently warn Dinan’s replacement governess, Peggy Frampton, who was already dressing for dinner, that ‘There’s a bit of a party going on in here Peggy, you had better not join us tonight.’4 The following morning Marie calmly told Peggy that there had been an ‘orgy’ the night before. Peggy, equally calmly, saw no signs of it and equated Marie’s description to her frequent hand-wringing and exclamations: ‘Cet affreux Afrique! Cet affreux Afrique!’5

  Donald, however, did not take Idina’s infidelities in quite such a matter-of-fact way. Instead his previously appealing fierce protectiveness erupted into ferocious anger. When in late 1933 he returned early from a safari to witness a half-dressed man leaping into a car and skidding away, Donald swung his ever-loaded gun and fired at the departing car until Idina arrived to restrain him.

  After that Idina employed a kitchen boy to sit with a view of the road for miles down the hill and a tomtom under his fingertips. The moment he saw the cloud of dust that marked an approaching car he was to beat the drum, giving Idina’s visitors time to leave by another route before her gun-toting husband returned. It wasn�
��t enough. Whenever Donald returned, footsore and camp-tired, from leading an expedition through the bush, he would find something to make him suspect that Idina had taken a lover in his absence. Idina began to fear the outbursts of violence that accompanied his return home.

  After an unpleasantly effervescent Christmas in 1933, Idina realised his devotion had evolved into obsession. Donald was now trying, quite literally, to shoot any man he suspected might be her lover. For the first time in her life Idina had to consider that life alone was an option preferable to life – or even death – with a gun-toting husband. She decided to tell Donald that she was leaving.6

  Early in the New Year Donald left on a month-long safari. In his absence Idina made preparations to leave for Europe for several months without him. With bullets flying around the house and garden and the now eight-year-old Dinan in need at least of some company of her own age and species (wildlife wandered through the house, sometimes semi-tamed, sometimes creating a great deal of panic), Idina decided that her daughter should return to England, as her friends were doing. For the past few years Idina had organised exchanged visits with Gemma St Maur, a young cousin of Chops Ramsden and Robin Long, Boy and Genesta’s son. Both of these children, and nearly all other European and American eight-year-olds in Kenya, were now being sent away to boarding school or back to England to be educated there.

  Sending children back Home from the far reaches of the British Empire was standard practice. It was regarded as Not Good to bring a child up under a raging sun. When Dinan had been small Idina had cared enough about this to dress her not only in a wide-brimmed sun hat and long sleeves but also the thick spine-pad that helped to counter the sun. Boarding schools would take children from as young as four and even keep them over the holidays if they had no relations to visit in England. Many middle- and upper-class children at this time conducted a purely postal relationship with their parents for years at a stretch.

  Idina did not, however, have to send Dinan to boarding school. Buck’s daughter Kitty was also eight. While Kitty’s elder brothers had been sent away to school, Kitty, as was the custom among the families who could afford to, was being educated at home by a governess. Kitty and Dinan could share lessons and provide some company for each other. Buck added to the generosity of his offer to bring up Dinan by allowing Idina to keep the income from Dinan’s share of the capital until Dinan married on the basis that Clouds, even if Dinan rarely managed to visit it, would remain her maternal home.

  Idina bought a pair of tickets, packed her and Dinan’s clothes and waited for Donald to return from safari. She intended to tell him that their marriage was over, she was going away and when she returned she expected him to have left the house. In sharp contrast to the end of her previous marriages, Idina had this time decided that she would stay living at the house she had built in Kenya, even if it meant living alone.7 She might be moving on from Donald, but she had invested too much of herself in Clouds to let it go. It had become clear that the only way to hang on to a better life was not to stake it upon the survival of a marriage. In any case, the new craze for aeroplanes meant that she was just a short flight from Nairobi – the planes could land on the lawns in front of Clouds. Life alone on a Kenyan farm was no longer such a lonely prospect.

  A couple of days before Donald was due back Idina began to contemplate what his reaction to her departure might be. On 11 February 1934 she sent a message to Cockie, who had by now not only married but left the incessantly faithless Bror Blixen, to come up to Clouds to give her moral support and to bring reinforcements. Cockie in turn asked Nellie Grant, Elspeth Huxley’s mother, to come too. Nellie agreed: ‘Have just agreed to go with Cockie to Clouds tomorrow for one night only as Dina wants moral support in facing Donald [her husband, who was given to fits of violence] . . . Anyway shall get some garden loot even if Donald does shoot us all.’8 The garden loot consisted of bundles of clippings, which Idina and Nellie had been exchanging for a decade and a half.

  Thus reinforced, Idina told Donald and then left for England immediately. She reached Fisher’s Gate in early March and installed Dinan in the care of Buck and his wife. After a few days she left for Paris, where she ordered some new clothes: ‘Lady Idina Haldeman, before leaving for Cairo, ordered a peach crinkled crepe satin evening dress with peach ostrich feather cape from Molyneux. Peach chiffon covers the shoulders and the feathers begin midway between shoulder and elbow. Very pale at first they deepen into almost orange and the tips curl up like inverted question marks.’9 Idina went on to Egypt for Easter at the beginning of April and, towards the end of the month, returned to London. She would spend three months in England catching up with old friends and then return to Kenya to live, as she had settled upon, without a husband.

  It seemed as though at last, as she entered her forties, Idina had found confidence in herself. She was showing an emotional stability that she had not displayed since her early marriage to Euan. But, in the first few days of May, amid the mêlée of cocktail and dinner parties that marked the beginning of the London Social Season, Idina received a note from a friend that would turn this new state of affairs on its head.

  The name of the friend was Sheila Milbanke. Sheila was a glamorous society beauty, generally described as ‘quite the nicest thing ever to have come out of Australia’.10 She had arrived in England in her late teens and made an early marriage. Like Idina, she had divorced, and was now married to the considerably older Sir John Milbanke, known as Toby and a military hero who had won Britain’s greatest award for bravery, the Victoria Cross. Being Australian, she was engagingly unconcerned by some of the rules of British society and approached life and the people around her in a straightforward, matter-of-fact way. As Cockie had done on safari in Kenya, Sheila had thus entranced the Prince of Wales and made herself a name as a Court favourite.

  In the note Sheila asked to meet up with Idina. When they met, Sheila was characteristically direct. Sheila and Toby were extremely close friends of Euan and Barbie’s. They spent a great deal of time staying with them and Sheila had therefore spent a great deal of time with Idina’s two sons, David and Gerard, who were now nineteen and eighteen, together with their three much younger half-brothers, Barbie’s children.

  Idina surely envied Sheila in this. She had not been allowed to see her sons since she had first left for Kenya, with Charles Gordon. Barbie had become mother to Idina’s children too, leaving Idina with no right to see them herself.

  But right or no right, Sheila told Idina, David now needed to see her, his real mother.

  Idina’s two sons had ‘totally different characters’, as Barbie’s sister Ursula had long spotted.11 While Gerard was ‘the most determined, obstinate little fellow with a will of iron’, David was ‘affectionate’ and ‘very easily influenced . . . you can get him to do anything by showing him a little love’. Life, Ursula had predicted, ‘will probably be harder for him than for G’.

  She was right. Both David and Gee, as Gerard had become known, were extremely bright and had jumped a year at Eton, which they had now left. Along with many of his generation, Gee’s imagination had been captured by the Air Force. He had sat the exam and had passed into Cranwell, the training academy, in second place, winning a prize cadetship. He had settled in well, was utterly content and within a month he had flown solo.

  David meanwhile had sat the Oxford entrance exam. He had narrowly missed a scholarship but had taken a place at the aggressively academic Balliol College to read Greats, consisting of Philosophy, Latin and Ancient Greek. He had been there since the previous October and was now burning with both brilliance and anger. He scorned his parents’ lifestyle as he did their politics – Euan was a Conservative MP and government minister, Barbie a political hostess – to the extent that he was no longer able to have a rational conversation with either of them. He was currently agonising over whether or not to become a celibate ‘Christian Socialist’ priest and, Sheila believed, he desperately needed to confide in somebody outside his paren
ts’ circle.

  For fifteen years Idina had not heard her son’s voice, seen his face, or touched his skin. David, Sheila said, really needed to talk to somebody who understood the ‘fire’ he was in,12 and who could listen.

  Idina could certainly do that.

  CHAPTER 21

  DAVID WALLACE BY NO MEANS KEPT EVERY LETTER HE was sent, although a few sets of intense correspondence with fellow undergraduates survived him. From Barbie, he kept very few letters, and only two from this difficult time in his life. The first was written to him on his year abroad, saying that he should stick out his time away, however miserable he felt. The second was about his passionately held political beliefs and the emotional crisis he was in. It was not a warm letter. Its coolness had so incensed him that he had picked up a pen and scrawled his own comments over it:

  Mayfair 6212

  19 Hill Street

  Berkeley Square W1

  Monday

  My darling David,

  Thank you for a [‘Oh!’ scrawled by David] letter I got this morning. I realized all these holidays that you were going through some sort of mental change and hesitated several times whether to talk to you about the outward signs of it, which seemed to be a sort of intellectual air of snobbery and superiority and lack of effort [‘largely “ability”’ added by David] to talk or mix with anyone[.]

  Darling, whatever you may do in the world one has to get on with one’s fellow men – either you are going to lead them or you are going to serve them. In either case you have got to understand them and get on with them and even the people you may despise as frivolous, idle or anything else you like probably have something in them that is fine and lovable so try never to judge hardly. And it is the typical soldier sailor type, which you may find very antipathetic at the moment which have yet, in the past, almost more than anyone made possible the life that you and your generation enjoy . . . You are quite right to be dissatisfied with the present capitalist system which has obviously partially failed and quite right to wish to alter some of the awful inequalities of life but please don’t just say you’re a communist just to startle and frighten me. [underlined and ‘NO!’ added by David]. In the first place it doesn’t a bit, in the second place [‘Oh!’ added by David] what do you mean by it, and what are you going to do about it? If you wish to put down the present system you must replace it with a thought-out system of Communism and plan to bridge the transition stage – it is no good being mearly [sic] destructive but you must be sure of your constructive plan as well. Then do you think Communism does away with inequalities, poverty etc? Certainly conditions in Russia, which is the only country that has tried it, are far worse, specially those of the poorest.